The New Face of Jazz: An Intimate Look at Today's Living Legends and the Artists of Tomorrow

by Cicily Janus, Marcus Miller (Foreword), Sonny Rollins (Afterword)

Jazz is thriving in the twenty-first century, and The New Face of Jazz is an intimate, illustrated guide to the artists, venues, and festivals of today's jazz scene. This book celebrates the living legends, current stars, and faces of tomorrow as they continue to innovate and expand the boundaries of this great musical legacy.     In their own words, artists such as McCoy Tyner, Arturo Sandoval, Diane Schuur, Terence Blanchard, Charlie Hunter, Nicholas Payton, George Benson, Maria Schneider, Christian McBride, Randy Brecker, Jean-Luc Ponty, Joe Lovano, Lee Ritenour, and more than 100 others share intimately about their beginnings, musical training, inspiration, and hard-earned lessons, creating a fascinating mosaic of the current jazz community.      Photographer Ned Radinsky contributes 40 amazing black-and-white portraits of these musicians doing what they do best€”playing. An appendix offers resources for jazz education; an exclu

Genres: Jazz

352 pages, Paperback

First published July 13, 2010

Reviews

[Randall Wallace · Rating 2 out of 5]

A pale imitation of excellent books in this genre “Talking Jazz”, “Jazz Talking”, “Growing Up with Jazz”, or “Downbeat’s The Great Jazz Interviews” and others. This book even has a foreword by Marcus Miller and afterword by Sonny Rollins, so what could go wrong? For starters the format didn’t work. Here is the format: each jazz artist gets a “Background and Sound” paragraph which attempts to explain why the artist is in the book, and then the artists submit a few paragraphs in their own words about their own journey.

The problems with the format: First, Jazz Artists are FAR better in interviews than in submitting edited written works. Second, the vast majority of “artists” in this book are not high on the food chain. The majority of the people in this book worked briefly for B listers like Wayne Krantz or Danny Gottlieb. In other words, most artists like Wayne and Danny aren’t in this book but some people who “played” with them at one point are. With few exceptions what these sidemen’s sidemen chose to say is so clichéd or vague as to be useless:

“I try to engage the audience” oh really? That’s novel… “Everything comes at a certain time and place” sheer genius. “I do the best I can by being true to myself” where are we seeing this? 1. American Idol five years ago 2. a beauty pageant in Tulsa, or 3. a “deep” book on jazz? And “I’m just grateful I can turn what I love into a career” nope, never heard that one before. All I could think while reading this book was Jazz is supposed to be about saying things in a different way, perhaps even a novel way and yet when these “master” artists of improvisation write and edit words, they might as well be back in high school rhyming “you” to “true” and “feeling oh so blue”. Even my heroes in this book like Phil Woods, Steve Swallow, Jean-Luc Ponty and Steve Turre are MUCH better in interviews then in writing and submitting the short statements shown in this book. I’d be happy to listen to Phil Woods order lunch, he is great in interviews, sharp as a tack as a human being and genius on alto but even he in this book can’t come close to the Phil Woods and others in the above mentioned books where they are being interviewed by someone who can ask follow up questions.

The only redeeming quality of this book were Marcus Miller’s Foreword and Randy Brecker’s beautiful written ode to his brother Michael practicing all day long as did his hero John Coltrane, both of them learning deeply as reward for their massive commitment. Without Marcus and Randy’s observations this book was a complete one star affair; on the back cover Wynton Marsalis says “One of the most important books on Jazz to date”. What rubbish! See for yourself…